Most people use Microsoft's "Internet Explorer" to browse the web but
there are alternatives. We tried the new version 9 of "Opera"
www.opera.com,
for example, and it was fun.

Opera, v.9, is free, and like another free browser, Firefox, lets you do
tabbed browsing. That means you can have more than one web site or page
open at a time. Each time you go to a new site, a tab is created on the
toolbar at the top of the screen. Click on those tabs whenever you want
to switch and you go immediately to that site or page.

Pressing the F6 key on your keyboard while Opera is open, brings up a
tiny treasure trove of fun and useful tools. You can choose to have a
game, a calendar, a news aggregator and dozens of other neat things.
Each appears as a window taking up about a sixteenth of your screen (you
can close any number of them at any time). A news aggregator collects
headlines from any number of sources you care to select. Click on the
headline and you get the story. You could also open windows for podcasts
and reference tools, like a dictonary and encyclopedia. Perhaps because
Opera is a Norwegian software company, the calendar and some other
features are available in many languages.

One last note about using relatively unknown browsers. In general, most
spyware, malware, viruses, etc., are designed to invade systems using
the most common Internet browsers. As a practical matter this means
Internet Explorer, which is the browser that comes with Windows and is
used by close to 90 percent of people searching the Internet. Using
other browsers makes one less vulnerable to attacks, if for no other
reason than the smaller numbers alone make it less profitable for
attackers to go after those users. All in all, Opera is fun, seems safe,
and you can't beat the price. NOTE: Version 9 is a beta version and we
did have some problems printing web pages.

A Torrent of Bits

One of the more interesting features of the "Opera" browser is that it
comes with "BitTorrent." This is a file sharing program for fast
transmission of large files between computers. You can download
BitTorrent without the Opera browser, but Opera makes it easier. Just
choose “BitTorrent” from the drop down list of search engines when
you’re in Opera, to look for “torrents,” which can be movies, music,
audio books, and the like. When you click to download, Opera saves the
file automatically. We opened it in RealPlayer, a free download from
www.realnetworks.com, and it played fine, though we couldn’t get it
to open in Windows Media Player.

BitTorrent is free from download.com and what it does is break up large
files into small packets that can be sent and received quickly and then
reassembled into the whole. The key is what is called a "peer to peer"
network. That means that each computer using the Bit Torrent software is
available for moving packets through to other computers. This has become
so popular that about half of all peer to peer traffic now uses
BitTorrent.

Members of the Motion Picture Association hate BitTorrent
because it could be used to move illegal copies of albums around the web
quickly. Despite the bad press this kind of file sharing has often
received, it is not just or even primarily for sharing illegal copies of
copyrighted work. There is lots of legal material available at
www.legaltorrents.com. There we found audio books for the Wizard of Oz
and P.G. Wodehouse, arcade games, and Fatman, a free adventure game. Of
course, businesses use BitTorrent regularly for large file
transmissions.

Just recently an alternative to Bit Torrent has become available and
it's called "BitComet." It too is available from
download.com and has
drawn enthusiastic comments from early users.

Words, words, words

We have two places to go for free word processors.

-- "ThinkFree" is a new online word processor, spreadsheet and
presentation program available at www.thinkfree.com. The word
processor is compatible with Microsoft Word and can both read MS Word
documents and save its own documents in MS Word format or as PDFs.
ThinkFree has a bulletin board feature which allows the user to post
notes that can be viewed by friends and colleagues. It also has some
templates, like invoices, resumes, profit and loss statements, etc. Best
of all, you can share any document you create with others, by sending
them a link to the file. Recipients can have editing or reading-only
rights.

This is the second free program that offers many of the features of
Microsoft Office. The first was OpenOffice, which was originally created
by a German company, and is available as a download from
www.openoffice.org.
Joy is a regular user of OpenOffice and prefers it for two reasons:

One reason is that OpenOffice is a download we can have on our own
computers rather than a program that has to be used online. We'll give
up disk space for the security of always having the program available
and not having to bother about our Internet connection being down or the
host server being down. The trouble with any online program is that if
you can't connect, you're out of luck and out of work. The other reason
for preferring it is that OpenOffice has been around for several years
and the bugs have been worked out.

Internuts

There are several free dictionaries available on the
web but the one we like best is www.askoxford.com. This is a site created by Oxford
University Press, publishers of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary,
the gold standard in the dictionary business.

AskOxford has definitions and explanations for 145,000 words and phrases
plus some word games like hangman, crossword puzzles, anagrams, etc.
They have a quiz each month, with small prizes awarded.